Benedict Cumberbatch was brought to tears by 'truly extraordinary' Eric scene

Yahoo UK

The actor spoke candidly with Yahoo about his experience making the Netflix series, which explores a father&#39;s struggle after his son goes missing.

Transcript

00:00 Vincent is quite a flawed character, he can be quite selfish, he can be quite egotistical,

00:03 but Eric does help him change over the course of the story.

00:06 So I wondered, how did you find playing both characters,

00:10 and also was the experience of voicing him the same as,

00:13 or similar to your experience voicing Smaug, for example?

00:17 No, very, very different. Very different.

00:19 That was an entire character, but this is an extension of the same person.

00:23 This is sort of a psychic split, an id, a devil of danger.

00:29 That's him knocking stuff over.

00:31 People, that's not me.

00:33 You know, it's very unusual to get to play against a version of yourself,

00:38 albeit a seven foot tall walk around white and purple and blue puppet monster.

00:42 So it was also the opportunity to work with an amazing puppeteer,

00:46 and that whole world is just absolutely captivating,

00:49 and always has been since I was very young,

00:51 and now as a father watching my children get utterly,

00:54 and all of us, the child in all of us get utterly bewitched by this animation of the inanimate.

01:01 It read on the page as a challenge,

01:03 as something extraordinary that I'd never seen or read before,

01:06 as a way to examine a character going through what Vincent goes through.

01:12 And in the playing it was just a joy.

01:15 A lot of humour, a lot of lightness as well as the dark,

01:18 and some mechanical things,

01:21 but it was the technical aspect of what Ollie was having to cope with inside that suit,

01:26 with this vision mask that shows two or three points of view of the actual scene.

01:31 He's not seeing as we see, he will see as the camera sees.

01:34 I mean, I kind of, people say, "What moved you most about the drama?"

01:38 Actually putting that on in one of the last days filming in New York,

01:41 and just I cried after it was put on, I said,

01:44 "I can't believe this is how you've done what you've done."

01:46 It's truly extraordinary, and to get to do a bit of that as well,

01:49 the kind of puppeteering in the show, within the show, is great fun.

01:52 I'm not sure I'm answering your question at all, but the voicing,

01:56 yeah, within the limits of that, you know, he's analogue, he's still part of Vincent,

02:00 he isn't an extraordinary thing with vocoder or effects,

02:03 or he's not a 400-year-old fire-breathing serpent of Hobbit fame.

02:08 He's something that we recognise from the worlds of the Henson puppets that we've grown up with.

02:14 So, yeah, it was important to authenticate him,

02:17 but give him a dialect that was different from Vincent's,

02:20 and a sort of gruffer, rough-around-the-edges honesty,

02:24 so that the humour, the ribaldry, the vice, the terrorising, the nannying,

02:30 all the kind of functions he operates with in the show could be coloured by that voice.

02:36 So, yeah, I tried.

02:37 It's hard when you're going, you know, to get all that expression in,

02:41 and that was a struggle sometimes, but it was a fun one.

02:43 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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